It’s an unnatural physical activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself. It means that you secrete various kinds of fatigues and poisons through your system that you don’t get rid of easily. As you get older, it’s worse. . . . One of the things that characterizes almost every older fighter I’ve ever seen training for a fight is the depression that hangs over him and his camp because the only thing good that can come out of it is money. The rest is all a foregone conclusion. Even if he wins the fight—even if he wins it well—he’s not going to get a new purchase on life out of the fight the way a young writer can by a decisive victory. And that’s true of writing. Writers will often make grave decisions—am I going to write this book or not? And at a certain point you have to believe that the book can be enormously important or you won’t suffer that kind of self-destruction.
Consequently, both writers and fighters are often hypochondriacs. “It goes with the territory,” he said.
A headache was the usual result of a day at Gramercy for Mailer, but overall it was a welcome respite from the physical inactivity of writing. Psychologically, it brought his two selves, or at least his “two systems of anxiety,” as he put it, into some kind of “quiet balance.” A couple of years later, when his knees started to go, “I gave it up, I eased out of it,” he said, “and have never felt as virtuous since.” Michelson remembers getting into the ring with Mailer just before he hung up his gloves. “I don’t remember who it was,” he said, “but someone at the gym asked Norman on his fifty-ninth birthday just how good a boxer he considered himself to be, and Norman came back with: ‘I’m better than any other 59-year-old novelist.’ ”
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THEIR marriage, the Mailers left for England. He had been offered a minor role in Ragtime, based on E. L. Doctorow’s novel and directed by Milos Forman, with whom he had become friendly. Mailer played Stanford White, the flamboyant nineteenth-century architect who designed, among many other structures, Madison Square Garden. A socialite and womanizer, he had a serious affair with actress Evelyn Nesbit, perhaps the most famous beauty of her day, when she was sixteen and he was in his mid-forties. Nesbit’s jealous husband, the railroad magnate Harry K. Thaw, shot and killed him in the roof garden of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Norris got a bit part in the film as White’s date, sitting next to her husband when he is shot.
The John Lennon tragedy occurred shortly after Mailer finished his stint on the film, and, retrospectively, it changed the experience for him. “The killing of John Lennon,” he said, altered everything: I no longer took my movie death seriously; I had the shock of a real death going through my system. Like fifty million other people I cared about Lennon; my own concerns were put into proportion.” A few years earlier Lennon and Yoko Ono had responded to Mailer’s request for financial help for a Canadian drug dealer, Robert Rowbotham, a friend of Richard Stratton’s, who had received an unconscionably long sentence for selling marijuana. Mailer testified at his trial. Lennon and Ono had also attended Susan and Marco’s engagement party in Brooklyn earlier in the year.
Forman had offered Mailer the role because he had the same kind of status in New York in 1980 that White had in 1900. “They both had an aura of accomplishment in art and social life,” Forman said. “Besides, I thought it might help me get invited to his parties.” Mailer said he took the role “to satisfy my curiosity.” He wanted to compare the experience of making experimental films with being in a $20 million commercial film, this one produced for Paramount Pictures by Dino De Laurentiis. “I thought it must be wonderful being a screen actor. Much easier than staring at blank sheets of paper. I was wrong. It wasn’t easy at all.” But he did get to meet his boyhood idol Jimmy Cagney, who played the police commissioner in the film. He and Norris also had their honeymoon during their week in London. When Michelson asked her what sights she saw during her visit, she answered, “The ceiling of my hotel room.”
The national moratorium on executions ended with Gilmore’s death, which opened a national debate on the morality of capital punishment. It was not surprising, therefore, that Walter Anderson, the new editor of Parade magazine, the Sunday supplement with a readership of 40 million, would contact Mailer about writing a piece on the topic. Anderson, a thirty-four-year-old ex-Marine sergeant who had done a tour in Vietnam, was a bit apprehensive, however, because Mailer had once described involvement with the magazine as “stepping in shit.” But Anderson was changing the gravitas of Parade by publishing writers such as Studs Terkel, David Halberstam, and John Cheever. Mailer had questions: “Norman wrote to me about the capital punishment essay,” Anderson recalled, “and said, ‘You may not be comfortable with what I produce.’ ” Anderson replied that whatever Mailer wrote would “set the benchmark on what people will argue against.” Anderson, who became a close friend and reader of Mailer’s manuscripts, said the piece was “brilliantly written.”
“Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment,” could have been the appendage Mailer once considered putting at the end of The Executioner’s Song. It explores the pros and cons in detail, noting that Gilmore’s insistence on being shot to death had underlined the issue “in royal purple ink.” He first considers the deterrence claim and finds it to be specious. Most murders, he argues, are committed by psychopaths “in need of quick gratification. Patience is not part of their powers.” Those who commit atrocities “are usually poor, raddled wretches so schizophrenic in their inmost wheels that psychiatry itself is disturbed by a look into their minds.” Retribution from society is not something that necessarily occurs to them. Conversely, there are crimes that “make one sick with rage”—innocent children killed in acts of mayhem, old ladies raped and tortured. Such crimes call forth “the instinct to flush it out,” find a scapegoat. “Living amid all the blank walls of technology, we require a death now and again, we need to stir that foul pot.” Perhaps, he says, “we need the official bloodbath to restore ourselves to the idea that society is not only reasonable, but godlike,” a point of view he immediately dubs as “cynical reasoning” and “vastly offensive.” Yet, he concludes that the primitive instinct that supports capital punishment “may be one of our last defenses against the oncoming wave of the computer universe.”
Anderson said that the magazine received thousands of letters on the essay. The response was so large, he believes, because Mailer’s reason for supporting some executions “is neither vengeance nor justice. Capital punishment is a safety valve.” Mailer’s ambivalence on the matter, a manifestation of the clash between his left-radical and conservative selves, is instructive, and sharpens the debate. But soon Jack Abbott would commit a crime that would add another layer of complexity to the question.
HE MIGHT HAVE completed Ancient Evenings in the summer of 1981, but Abbott was paroled on June 5, 1981. Jack Henry Abbott had been born out of wedlock in January 1944 (the month Mailer received his induction notice) at Camp Skeel, an army base in Michigan, to Mattie Jung, a prostitute of Chinese descent from Salt Lake City, who later committed suicide. His father was Rufus Abbott, an Irish-American soldier from Texas, reputed to have been a “short-tempered alcoholic.” Young Abbott grew up in foster homes and detention centers, and began a run of sentences as a teenager that kept him behind bars for all but nine months of his life until age thirty-seven. His crimes included passing bad checks, robbing a bank, and killing another inmate in a prison fight. Abbott was proud, violent, intransigent, and consequently spent a lot of time in solitary—fourteen years. An intelligent and voracious reader with an extensive vocabulary, he was unable to pronounce many words that he had never heard spoken. He called himself a “state-raised convict,” and wrote that he had “high esteem” for violence. For the good convict, violence is a tool that “makes us effective, men whose judgment impinges on others, on the world: Dangerous killers who act alone and without emotion, who act with calculation and principles, to avenge themselves.” But outside prison walls, he promised, it would be different. Thomas Harrison, the parole chairma
n, asked him: “What we’re interested in is your potential for hurting somebody. You say there is no such potential, is that right?” Abbott replied “No, no. . . . There won’t be nothing like that.”
Abbott’s anger was not unusual. He had been beaten, drugged, and humiliated any number of times. In the months before he was paroled, there was a prison strike at Marion, which began when an inmate threw a tray of food from his cell. Then, as alleged in a U.S. District Court suit filed by prisoners, Marion guards took prisoners one at a time, hands manacled, to a special room where they were beaten with three-foot wooden clubs. Abbott was the last one. After that, he told his sister, he expected to be killed and became paranoid about his situation. A lawyer he knew later told a reporter, “He had become deathly afraid of ending up in a cemetery plot there.” It was at this point that he gave authorities the names of the strike leaders and implicated some defense lawyers in giving drugs to inmates, which led to his release.
Mailer, Scott Meredith, Robert Silvers, of the NYRB, and Erroll McDonald, a young editor at Random House, wrote letters to the Utah Board of Pardons at Abbott’s request attesting to Abbott’s extraordinary literary abilities (because Abbott had escaped from the Utah State Prison, he had to return there in order to be paroled). In his letter, Mailer said, “I am aware of the responsibility of what I propose,” adding that “Abbott is in need of a special solution that can reach out to his special abilities.” Mailer later told a friend, “I didn’t see how I could not help.” He became Abbott’s most devoted champion, although McDonald and Mailer’s wife, Norris, spent more time with him, and Silvers was generous to him in several ways. Random House gave Abbott a book contract and a $12,500 advance. Mailer picked up Abbott at the airport, and insisted on carrying his bags. Then he brought him home for dinner. Norris looked down as they climbed the stairs and saw him for the first time.
He was wearing a dark blue pin-striped suit with a vest, a white shirt, and red tie, and little round glasses. It was a color Xerox of what Norman wore all the time. He came up to the door, smiled, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Jack,” he said. He was about as tall as I am, slim, neat, and nervous. I couldn’t tell what his ethnicity was. He had a slightly exotic look, with tan skin, and was much more attractive than I had anticipated. I wasn’t afraid of him at all. In fact, there was something moving about him, dressed up in his Norman suit with those little glasses.
John Buffalo showed Abbott his G.I. Joe toys and then sat down with him, Matt, and their parents for a dinner of roast chicken and mashed potatoes. Abbott had seconds and said it was the best meal of his life. Norris was saddened when she realized that what he said was probably not flattery.
For the next few weeks, Abbott came to dinner two or three times a week. He thought Norris was marvelous. Silvers recalled Abbott telling him, “She’s great, she’s great! She understands.” He confided in her, told her about his mother and how he had bought a new stone for her grave in Salt Lake City. Almost every day he would call her on the telephone. Mailer was at his studio down the street most of the day working on Ancient Evenings. Abbott asked Norris for advice on matters such as where to buy toothpaste or stamps. According to Robert Sam Anson, who wrote a long, detailed piece about him for Life, Abbott told her about his hopes and fears, including some unnamed women he said “were after me.” Norris said, “Don’t worry, Jack. I’m not after your body; I’m after your mind,” and Abbott laughed, which was “something rare for him.” Norris also took him shopping at Macy’s. Buying a pair of jeans was a major operation.
“Is there someone who issues them to you?” he said, eyes wide, looking at the stacks and racks of clothes.
“No. You just find your size in something you like and go try them on. Over there, in the dressing rooms.”
“You mean they let you take and try these on? With nobody watching?”
“It was a concept he could hardly grasp,” Norris said. She hesitated to get too involved with him, “but Norman had little time or inclination to go shopping with Jack, or answer his questions—there were so many.”
Mailer did bring Abbott to the Salvation Army halfway house on East 3rd Street in the Bowery, where he was required to live until August 25. On another day, he took him to the New York Public Library and showed him the Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia), twelve massive folio volumes created in the second half of the nineteenth century by one of the fathers of Egyptology, Karl Richard Lepsius. It is likely that he showed him Volume III, containing drawings of bas-reliefs of Ramses II at the Battle of Kadesh, a key episode in the yet unpublished Ancient Evenings. Jill Krementz took a photo, published in People, of Mailer and Abbott examining one of the folios.
Erroll McDonald had regular meetings with Abbott about the upcoming publication of In the Belly of the Beast (a series of letters to Mailer about prison life) and was one of the few people who saw how frazzled Abbott was, especially in new social situations. As he and Abbott were about to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Abbott almost lost his temper when a guard ordered him to put out his cigarette. He put it out, but glared at the guard. There were other such incidents. When Mailer appeared on the Cavett show several months later, he explained the psychology of state-raised convicts. “When you’re in a jail cell, the only way you keep your head intact is to make constructions with that head, every day of your life.” Creating scenarios to explain all that you observe is a critical survival tool, he said. Compounding this sense of menace is the noise in prisons. “The din is constant,” Mailer said.
In prison, every little moment is of significance. The guard who walks by who’s been friendly to you every other day and suddenly he frowns at you; that means the warden has gotten down on your case. Or that some powerful prisoner is having thoughts about you. And the guard is associated with that powerful prisoner and you’re getting the message. Now whether these things are true or not, it’s the way people in prison tend to think, because they have nothing to divert themselves.
If there is agreement about any aspect of the Abbott story, it is that the Bowery halfway house was one of the worst places imaginable for him to have been sent. It wasn’t prison, but it was noisy, filled with parolees, and located in a tough neighborhood. There were rules and regulations to be followed, including daily face-to-face checks. Later, Mailer would testify that Abbott loathed living there. “Instead of unwinding him, it was tightening him up.” When someone lifted a pair of his shoes, Abbott called Norris and said he was going to kill the thief. Not much later, his blue pin-striped suit was missing, and when he called Norris, she got “the feeling of lava boiling down inside Jack.” As it turned out, the director of the house had put the suit away so it would not be stolen.
One night after Abbott had been in New York for about two weeks, the Mailers had a dinner party for him, inviting four close friends: Jean Malaquais and his daughter, Dominique, Dotson Rader, and Pat Kennedy Lawford. Abbott was uneasy. Rader described him as “the repairman who came to fix the fridge and then was asked to stay for dinner.” But Abbott knew Malaquais and agreed with his radical politics, and he had also read some of Rader’s books about the anti–Vietnam War movement, so he was able to carry on a conversation. The evening fell apart, however, when Malaquais began criticizing the United States as an imperialist country. “Abbott ratcheted it up a notch,” Norris wrote, “calling America a fascist hellhole run by pigs.” Mailer was getting nervous, especially after Pat Lawford, the sister of a martyred president, got into it with Abbott. She asked him why, if he hated the country so unreservedly, he didn’t leave it. He answered he would like to go to Cuba. That was sufficient, Norris said, to unhinge Mrs. Lawford, who replied, “Cuba! Splendid, I’ll buy you a ticket. One way!” Then she and Rader left. On the way home, she told him that Abbott had a killer’s eyes.
At the end of June, the Mailers went to Provincetown where they were renting a large house in the East End for a month. Abbott was invited for a long weekend. He had his
own room on the water, and gazed out for hours. He had never seen the ocean before and didn’t know how to swim. They showed him around town, and he had his first ice cream cone in thirty years. Over lunch with Norris at an outdoor café on Commercial Street, he explained to her how to kill someone with a knife. “He said it should be a sharp knife, and you should put the tip between the person’s second and third shirt buttons and push hard, one quick thrust. That sends the knife right into the heart, and it’s over immediately.” Abbott seemed to think that he was providing her with a valuable tip, she said.
Danielle was there during Abbott’s visit, and her father asked her to go to the movies with him. “It never occurred to any of us that we should be afraid of him,” Norris said. Danielle, twenty-four at the time, said she would never dream of defying her father. “He was always certain of the value of unusual experience.” She and Abbott, whom she described as “extremely handsome with chiseled features,” walked over a mile to the theater. He was “socially unskilled, but very respectful,” she said, and “seemed like a caged animal.” Abbott got up four or five times during the show, and when he came back, “he was sniffing and snorting like he had taken cocaine.” On the long, dark walk back to the East End, he talked a bit about prison, but was generally reserved. The whole experience was “unnerving,” she said.
A letter from a Marion inmate, Garrett Trapnell, to novelist Peter Matthiessen had been passed on to Mailer by Bob Silvers. It stated that Abbott had given a 116-page deposition to an assistant U.S. attorney about lawyers sneaking in drugs to prisoners in Marion, and also that he had informed on others, breaking the code of convict solidarity. That deposition had made Abbott immediately eligible for parole. The letters of Mailer and others played only a minor role. The Utah Board of Pardons chairman was quoted in The New York Times as saying that “Mr. Abbott had been given psychological tests and that the results were ‘consistent’ with his being released.” When he was in Provincetown, Anson wrote, Abbott was concerned about how Mailer now felt about him, given the information that he was a snitch. He denied, however, informing on fellow convicts, admitting only to implicating the lawyers. Mailer said he couldn’t judge him. “I don’t know what I would have done. I never had to spend 25 years in prison.”
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